Hello again, What Culture Comic Review readers. I had a couple of weeks off due to a break on Before Watchmen and frankly some pretty dull comics released. I also didn’t bother reviewing Consequences #3 & #4 as I felt both were treading water and really only offered glimmers of progression (and mostly regression – seriously, what is going on with Wolverine? First he’s pissed, then he’s all understanding, then he’s pissed off again). Anyway, I’m back to take a look at what the Consequences mini series achieved and seeing if post AvX is a good place for the X-Men to be.

So Cyclops has been all distant in prison, sticking to his story about what he did in AvX as being mostly for the greater good and in issue#4 we discovered Magneto, Magik and Danger are all a team now and are looking to break Cyclops out for the betterment of Mutantkind. Yup, that’s right folks, Magneto has flipped sides of the coin again and is being all bad again but this time it feels flaccid and wholly uninteresting. Do you remember when Magneto used to come back in the 90s? Shutting down planets and living all godlike with Acolytes in an Asteroid. He comes off as a henchmen to Cyclops in this and it’s just so underwhelming.

We get a brief side order of Hope in this final issue as she gets told off by The Avengers….again but it’s pretty much down to business with a prison break mutant style and a Cyclops who just refuses to go all the way bad but deep down you just wish he would already. Gabriel Hernandez Walta provides the best art of this largely ugly looking mini series and even though his work is a little static in places, I found his stuff quite interesting and something a little new for X-Men, making the mainstream title feel a little more indie and different than the slick AvX that has come before it.

Anyway, given all the pre-awareness for Marvel Now, it doesn’t take a genius to guess Cyclops gets out and will form the All New X-Men alongside Magneto and his new team of bad ass ladies. This, in many ways feels like a cop out, resetting to the status quo pre AvX. Wolverine with his X-Kids. Cyclops with his adult approach. This feels like a shame because how ever stretched out Consequences may have felt, mainly due to it’s fairly obvious plot, it did manage to do one key thing… make Avengers vs X-Men feel like it was important to the Marvel Universe, a trick the 12 part epic failed on almost entirely.

I was really hoping that the writers would draw out where Scott Summers sits in the Marvel Universe. Spend some time in the cell working out his future or if he did escape make his path his own, not one that’s been trodden in before with new faces standing behind him. Scott Summers just wouldn’t side with Magneto in my mind. There’s too much history there and even though Summers seems a little bit down on himself, teaming up with Mags seems to signify Scott has resigned himself to the bad guy route and I find that really lazy.

AvX: Consequences winds up being the connecting piece from AvX to Marvel NOW and honestly, one decent sized One Shot could have covered most of the stuff in this five issue mini series.Dragging out the same conversation for five issues is Marvel’s way of getting another trade out there and carries on their milking of AvX that little bit further. All in all this series slowed things down and focused on the Scott Summers problem but at the last hurdle it’s just been an excuse to have a mix up of team line ups AGAIN. There’s a sense that until the next event, it’s back to Wolverine and Cyclops arguing over what is essentially the same outlook for mutantkind and the future of the X-Men. At this stage, I feel we need a villain to come along and shake things up. The X-Men are so bored they just can’t stop squabbling between themselves it seems. At the start of Consequences I thought my love of the X-Men had a chance to come back, instead X-Men and Marvel NOW have something they need to prove to me before my boredom of all things mutant finally takes control of my wallet every week and I wave goodbye to the petty squabbling X-Men for good. Incidentally, that should be a title of a new spin off X-comic as all the new titles want to avoid just being called X-Men it seems.

Discussion

2 Comments

Thanks Marcus for putting in all the effort of reviewing these comics. It seems it is more of a chore that a pleasure.

I haven’t read any of the new X-men comics, and from your reviews I don’t think I want to. I find it a bit sad to read how far Cyclops has fallen from being the model X-man in the early 80s, and too how much Logan has lost his identity from his original miniseries.

I went about 4 years in the late 2000’s without reading X-Men after a good decade of reading literally everything X and it’s taken me about 2-3 years to get a handle on things again. My big problem is I really want the X-Men to be great again so I still stay conected by reading the core titles but it is beginning to feel like enough is enough. It’s never gonna quite click back into place for me with my beloved muties I think and even though I wanted the event of AvX to change all that, Marvel NOW seems to be the last hope (or at least the last chance I’m willing to give them – there’s just too much genuine good stuff out there to continue to watch the X-Men struggle along).

Not sure if you have seen the latest Marvel Previews but it seems Beast if gonna bring the X-Men back from the past to have young Scott talk to current Scott about his problems next. Where are all the great X-villians again? Also the problem with Wolverine is he’s literally everywhere all the time and issue by issue and title by title, he’s a different guy. Wolverine used to be such an outsider and now he’s everything to everyobdy and that’s just not working at all.